He was born in Kyōbashi-ku, Tokyo, on 25 July 1883, as the fourth son of Arinobu Fukuhara, the head of Apothecary Shiseidō (which in 1927 would be incorporated as Shiseidō) and Toku Fukuhara (福原 とく).
The third brother predeceased his birth, so he was named and treated as the third son.
He went to Columbia University to study pharmacology in 1908, and after his graduation traveled around England, Germany and Italy before settling in Paris in 1913.
While there he certainly viewed much art and is likely to have seen various exhibitions of post-Impressionist works; Iizawa sees the influence of artists such as Seurat in Fukuhara's photographs later collected as "Paris and the Seine."
The ten plates of Le nouveau Paris et la Seine were published one per month in the magazine Shashin Geijutsu (寫眞藝術), from November 1922 through September 1923 (there was a break in January).